Sentimental Journey/Decadence in Paradise: Nobuyoshi Araki

Split into two different projects, this exhibition of Araki’s black-and-white photographs is part sexual fantasy, part autobiography. The collection of smaller pictures that follow his wife, Yoko Araki, through their wedding and honeymoon, then onto the deaths of both her and, eventually, their cat, is the stronger of the two – by a long way.

These alluring pictures focus on a deeply personal relationship – he shoots his wife sleeping, brushing her teeth, stripping off, and even mid-sex, with a suggestive picture of her head thrown back, lips parted, the blankets blurring from the moving camera. Originally published as three books –Sentimental Journey (1971), Winter Journey (1991) and Spring Journey (2011) – these works are deeply autobiographical. Most impressively, they are able to tell a story, with moments of humour, sadness, romance and banality all present. In one print, Yoko lies on a half-made motel bed, dressed in a figure-hugging outfit. Looking into the camera, her expression suggests a shared joke, a look of mutual understanding in which we are a third party. These images stand in surprising contrast to some of Araki’s more attention-grabbing, and consciously constructed pieces, such as portraits of women tied in bondage, and flowers framed to look like genitalia. The contrast is also evidence of an artist whose oeuvre is enormous – he has produced nearly 500 books, portraying everyone from Lady Gaga to Japanese pensioners.

In the series chronicling his wife’s illness, there is a photograph of the artist wearing a medical mask in a hospital room, raising his eyebrows. Mawkish and affecting, the image of humour in the face of death is abruptly interrupted as you turn the corner and see Yoko’s face, framed in a silk-lined coffin, under a layer of white orchids. Her cremated bones on a steel table are accompanied by similar images of their deceased cat.

The second section is topped off with an arresting photomontage put together from studies of flowers, accompanied by a melancholy piano piece. The photographs leading up to it, however, underwhelm. Girlish dolls straddling priapic flower stamens and beset by ravenous toy dinosaurs don’t bear comparison to the touching Sentimental Journey. Clare Pennington

Originally posted in Time Out Beijing

Water Work: Yun-Fei Ji

After Hurricane Katrina rocked New Orleans in 2005, the world was shaken by the realisation that even the mighty US government was unable to help some of those worst affected by the floods. Then, in China, cracks in the Three Gorges Dam in 2011 meant the sudden resettlement of 300,000 people – adding to the million already relocated by the mega-project.

Both are moments that defined our modern age with their images of devastation and suffering. In Water Work, the artist Yun-Fei Ji sets out to re-record the effects of these and other examples of mass human displacement through an unexpected medium. He does so through Chinese traditional ink and watercolour painting, lithography and printing; an ancient form of social commentary for which literary and artistic giants such as Du Fu (712-780 AD) are still revered. What’s more, he does it well.

Inside the exhibition space, ‘Water Rising’ (2006) takes the shape of a long scroll winding around the corners of the narrow white exhibition hall. Viewers must move in order to follow its tale, as it depicts chairs piled up amid bundles of belongings, and nearby waters creeping up diminishing mountains. The trees seem half-razed, shorn of their former majesty. The works in this exhibition might stand as witnesses to their time, but they are also filled with inventiveness, poetic gusto and artistic creativity.

‘The Last Days of Village Wen’ (2011) begins with a chapter written in clear, clerical calligraphy. It tells of the flooding of Wen: ‘There was no rain for eight months,’ the scroll begins, before describing the need for villagers to become itinerant workers. Then, in a way not only creative, but deeply emotive, it narrates a sudden flood that kills enough fish to feed Wen for years.

Other pieces are interwoven with legendary creatures and animalistic humans. In ‘Boxers’ (2003), the myths and realities of the Boxer Rebellion are treated with analytical and artistic fervour; some Chinese figures are depicted as half-pig, while a few of the foreign colonialists, singled out by their rounded beige helmets, viciously gobble down whole women. Tragedy and political satire sit side by side.

Elsewhere, in ‘The Last Days Before the Flood’ (2006), officials armed with whips float god-like behind streams of people, moving them on like herds of cattle. Ji makes his points with efficiency. This exhibition is both a visual feast and a sharp and timely commentary set in the wider context of global history. Clare Pennington



Originally posted in Time Out Beijing

Lee Tzu-Hsun solo exhibition

Lee Tzu-Hsun says that finding balance in his life has always been difficult. On the one hand, he is a well of emotions; on the other, a paragon of rectitude and calm. In an extreme example, he once wore the same outfit – black trousers, a white shirt and a black V-neck sleeveless jumper – for four years in a row. It is through art, he says, that he finds ‘reconciliation’ between his opposite halves.

Pace Beijing is currently hosting Lee’s first solo show on the Mainland, three years after the Taiwanese-born artist moved here from Saarbrücken, the small German town he calls home. His works display all the traits of a wonderfully mad scientist. ‘Ukranian Aircraft No 2 (2011)’ is a leaf-green contraption that turns in circles on Pace’s white-washed wall, clicking and revving like a complex toy train set. It looks vaguely like the kind of airship you might see in a Studio Ghibli film. The mechanical creations in this exhibition are reminiscent not only of kitchen appliances, but human bodies and organs. In the middle of one room, a bowl of water and the faces of two workers are formed into a shape reminiscent of a womb.

‘For me, creating art is like the act of carrying out research,’ says the Christian artist. ‘Machinery has a language of its own. When I was little, I was fascinated by the structure of automobiles; how one little cog turning leads to another one moving, bringing the whole thing into movement. I think of the world as a huge machine, and of us as its parts, just like the gears and cogs of an engine.’

But although he strives towards perfection, Lee claims his creations are actually a mirror of the constant change and imperfections of humans and nature. ‘I pick out and collect little pieces of the world and of human life that already exist around me and reproduce them using my own perspective,’ says the softly spoken artist. ‘I respect the changes and accidents in my work that happen as it goes along.’

Clare Pennington, with additional reporting by Penelope Peng

Originally posted in Time Out Beijing